ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2011) ? After pounding North Carolina and Virginia on Aug. 27, Hurricane Irene made a second landfall near Little Egg Inlet, N.J., early Sunday morning, Aug. 28, still as a category one hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph (120 kilometers per hour). It then weakened slightly before making a third landfall over Coney Island, N.Y. as a 65-mph (100-kilometer-per-hour) tropical storm. Irene's heavy rains, winds and storm surge are causing widespread problems throughout the U.S. mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
This infrared image of Irene was taken by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft at 2:47 a.m. EDT on Aug. 27, a few hours before the storm's second landfall in New Jersey.
The AIRS data create an accurate 3-D map of atmospheric temperature, water vapor and clouds, data that are useful to forecasters. The image shows the temperature of Irene's cloud tops or the surface of Earth in cloud-free regions. The coldest cloud-top temperatures appear in purple, indicating towering cold clouds and heavy precipitation. The infrared signal of AIRS does not penetrate through clouds. Where there are no clouds, AIRS reads the infrared signal from the surface of the ocean waters, revealing warmer temperatures in orange and red.
AIRS is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., under contract to NASA. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
More information about AIRS can be found at http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov. More on NASA's hurricane research and Irene is online at NASA's hurricanes/tropical cyclones website: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/main/index.html and the JPL TC-IDEAS hurricane website: http://hurricanes.jpl.nasa.gov .
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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/_XnGvUILe5c/110828191433.htm
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You've picked your router and set up all the basics, so now it's time to optimize your network. In this lesson, we're going to look at how to improve your network's speed and wireless signal so it's operating at full capacity. 
Wi-Fi is nice, but it's rife with signal issues and slower than a wired ethernet connection?even when Wi-Fi is performing its best. If you can wire up your devices, you should. When transferring files between devices you'll always get better performance over a wire, and internet connections over 25mpbs will also benefit from wires. That may seem strange when many routers advertise wireless speeds that are much higher, but real-world performance is generally far lower.
While radio frequency interference is going to be an issue in your home, one of the biggest causes of interference that'll slow down your Wi-Fi speed is other Wi-Fi routers in your area. That's often because most Wi-Fi routers default to the same channels: 6 or 11. (You don't need to understand all of this to fix the problem, but we'll explain.) Additionally, the standard channel width is 20 MHz, which means that even though you're on channel 6, which has a frequency of 2.437 GHz, your channel width spans 20 MHz around that frequency. Since each channel is only 5 MHz apart from the next, your signal is bleeding into the others. While you can adjust the channel width, this may only help some of the time as your router's needs will change. Ideally channel width would be adaptive, but since that isn't a reality the best thing you can do is pick a channel as far from the others as possible.
Your Wi-Fi router transmits its signal with a set amount of power, but that's something you can adjust. In theory, if your signal sucks you'd want to just transmit it as powerfully as possible. In reality, boosting your router's transmit power too much can actually make things worse. But there's a magic number: 70 mW.
Sometimes router settings just aren't going to cut it, so you need to put on your tinkering hat and make a DIY booster. In episode four of the Lifehacker Show, we built this simple Windsurfer booster out of card stock and tinfoil. On top of that, we have many more Wi-Fi boosting projects, such as this tin can extender or a repurposed satellite dish. There are also several range-boosting products on the web (like this one), but if you can avoid shelling out another $70, it's worth giving a DIY option a try.
In our previous lesson we talked a little bit about Quality of Service, which is essentially a set of rules that throttles bandwidth when a person (your roommate) or application (BitTorrent) is trying to hog it all. Say, for example, you want to video chat while your roommate is downloading a movie. QoS helps make sure both endeavors have enough bandwidth. We have a full guide on configuring QoS, but here's a quick overview of what you need to do.
